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Monthly Archives: June 2014

What do you consider to be marketing? When you tell your friends and family that you’re starting a new business? When you open for business and there’s a write-up in the local business journal?

Many things small business owners and entrepreneurs do are considered marketing. It’s just that, all too often, they don’t realize or consider that what they are doing is actually marketing, so they don’t do them well. They don’t develop a good pitch for their business. They don’t send a press release to announce their grand opening.

Even the sign on your door is considered marketing. I’m not talking about the sign on the street that you paid umpteen thousand dollars to have put up. I’m talking about the sign you hand wrote in sharpie on a neon green piece of paper and taped to the front door of your retail location to display the store hours. This is marketing! Those afterthought things we do as small business owners and entrepreneurs are, in fact, marketing. If we don’t do them well, we aren’t taking care of business. Our business.

Often, marketing professionals talk about research. What’s the perfect market for our service? How will the market respond to our product? Who is the most likely to visit our store? What are the competitors doing and how are they doing it?

The results of the research can be enlightening, discouraging, or a variety of other adjectives. The question still remains: what do you do once you have the research?

Research – just like marketing plans and business plans – is useless unless put into practice. If you’ve narrowed down the perfect demographic to target with your marketing, you have to actually market to them.

The key part of the research should include where your audience is living, and how they engage in those spaces. Whether it’s on social channels or in real-world environments, your target demographic has characteristics. Your research should be teaching you all about those things so you can communicate more effectively.

But the key will always be in doing. Research is useless without action.